March 2012

While everybody else is stuck in 1080p — aka “full HD” — Apple is thinking and developing on a bigger canvas than that — starting with the new iPad‘s 2048 x 1536 screen. They are always looking to move standard usage forward by large steps (where they change the whole market and win big in the process), and you can bet they’re doing that again with display. The iPad display won’t be the last Apple one to break out of the 1080p mold.

For a snapshot of where we are now, go shop for a computer monitor . Most of what you’ll find is 1920 x 1080: the dimensions of HDTV, and the continued embodiment of ATSC standards for TV that were adopted in the early 1990s in anticipation of the fully digital age. That age is now here, and in the process TV is getting slowly absorbed into the Internet. So, at this point in history, your computer monitor can be your TV, and vice versa. Digital movie production is also now standardized on 1080p24 (24 frames per second) standard. So it looks like everything is settled, right? Well, I am sure Steve Jobs and friends looked at that situation several years ago and saw “stuck” instead of “settled.” The new iPad is the first clear clue that this was the case.

In the long roster of display resolutions, the iPad’s dimensions are QXGA, which is among the breed of 3×4 resolutions. 1080p is 16×9. What matters here, however, isn’t the standard being used, or the dimensions, but breaking out of a currently defaulted (or stuck) mode.

The main question for me is whether or not Apple will succeed in building a walled garden for everything new that breaks out of the old 1080p mold. I doubt they’ll succeed, but I’ll bet they’ll try.

Airport wi-fi isn’t the biggest business, or the smallest. I’m not even sure it’s a discrete category. Some of it is a phone company side business (T-mobile, AT&T). Some of it is a business in itself (Boingo). Some of it is just a supply of overhead to airports or lounges that want to provide free wi-fi or to charge for access under their own brand.

Here in Boston, Logan Airport has a complicated thing where you have a choice of many for-pay access options, or free access if you jump over a small hurdle. For my phone it was watching a video that the phone wouldn’t play. But at least the Web page said “If the video doesn’t run, click here to connect.” I did and it worked. But it was not so easy on my computer, where it provided a choice of watching the video or answering a survey. The video, an ad for BMW that has been running for months (I fly a lot out of here), was followed by a page with an error code. I closed the window, re-started the browser and did the survey. Same result. So I changed browsers. This time there was just a video, provided by HP, and “powered by AWG” it said. I muted the sound and watched the video, which promoted an HP netbook. Without the sound the ad was fairly worthless. More interesting was the countdown to the connection, which ran above the ad. After running from 30 seconds to zero, I got a page with a big spinning wheel that ran and ran. Another fail.

Then I saw there’s an access point called AWGwifi and tried that. It failed too.

Meanwhile here at the United Club, the T-Mobile access they’ve provided for many years also failed as soon as I clicked on the link for club members. Of course the people behind the desk are not in charge of that. All they can do is report the problem, which I guess is one of the many that have come up through the long slow merger between United and Continental.

So I’m getting on through my phone’s 3G data plan. But I won’t be uploading the photos I had wanted to, because I don’t want to hit a cost jump if I go over my monthly allotment of bits.

The best airport wifi system I’ve seen so far is the one at the Continental club, and a few scattered airports I don’t recall: the wi-fi just works. It’s open, free and requires no logging in or going through a promotional gauntlet. Maybe that’s not “secure,” but are any of these paid systems secure either? One can be a bad actor over any of them.

I would think there is a market opportunity here for a creative approach — one that might be paid but doesn’t require becoming a member of something. Making it possible to just get on the Net with no hassle and no promotional BS would make a lot of travelers happy.

Newspapers got off on the wrong foot when they started publishing on the Web, by giving away what was valuable on the newsstand, and charging for last year’s fishwrap. That is, they gave away the news and charged for the olds.

This was understandable, because the papers wanted to participate in this new Web thing, which was very live and now and all that; and the Joneses they needed to keep up with were mostly doing the same thing. And, since selling archives had been a business all along — though not a very big one — they stuck with charging $2.95 or $3.95 for, say, a sports story from 1973.

Now the big papers, led by the The New York Times, are charging for at least some of the news in their digital versions, but also still charging for the old stuff. So they’re not quite charging for the news and giving away the olds (as I recommended back in 2006), but they seem to be moving slowly in that direction. More about that later. What I’d rather talk about first is their bait-and-switch game. It’s not bait-and-switch by the letter of the law, but the spirit is there, because the true costs are hidden.

Today, for example, the Timesannounced it will be cutting in half the number of articles readers on the Web can view for free in a given month, starting on April Fools Day. The old number was twenty. The new one is ten. Specifics for non-subscribers:

Get 10 articles each month on NYTimes.com, as well as access to the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds.

If you’ve already read your 10 free articles, you can still read our content through links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines and blogs.

Digital subscribers will —

Enjoy unlimited access to the full range of reporting from the world’s most respected journalists in their fields.

No limit on the number of articles, videos, blogs and more on your computer, smartphone or tablet.

Access to 100 Archive articles every four weeks.

Access to Election 2012, our exclusive politics app for iPhone and Android as well as The Collection, our fashion app for iPad — depending on the subscription you choose.

Home subscribers get free digital access.

The boldest print on that same page says “pay just 99¢ for your first 4 weeks.” That’s your bait. Below that it says “subscription options,” which links to this page here. Nowhere on either page does it say what happens after those first four weeks. For that info you need to select a button next to one of the three 99¢ choices, then click on the “GET UNLIMITED ACCESS” button. This takes you to the order page where you enter your credit card info. There it also says,

TRY IT TODAY FOR JUST $0.99 NYTimes: All Digital Access Unlimited access to NYTimes.com, and the NYTimes smartphone and tablet apps.* $0.99 for your first 4 weeks ($8.75 / week thereafter)

The asterisk is unpacked at the bottom of the page, where the it says,

Your order (applicable taxes may be added)
First 4 Weeks $0.99
Thereafter $35.00 every 4 weeks

So the real price is about $455 per year, after that first month. (Math: $8.75 x 52 weeks.) It’s an old game, and lots of sellers play it, but it’s still icky. If the Times is bold enough to be blunt about the value it’s subtracting from its free product, why not be bold enough to say the price goes up $35.01 after the first $.99?

Maybe because they’ve had that same pitch for awhile, and it’s working fine. In this Poynter story, Andrew Beaujon writes, “The New York Times Media Group says it has ‘approximately 454,000 paid subscribers’ to its digital products.” That comes to about $206,570,000 per year, after the first month. Pretty good. I have no problem with that, if the market bears the cost, which it seems to be doing. And maybe now more subscribers will get tired of being cut off after 10 views, or using multiple browsers to get around the limit a bit.

But why keep charging for the old stuff — especially the really old stuff? Wouldn’t it be a Good Thing make all of it easily reachable?

— 1923–1986: Your digital subscription includes 100 archive articles every four weeks in this date range (from January 1, 1923 through December 31, 1986). After you’ve reached the 100-article limit for the month, articles from 1923 through 1986 are $3.95 each.

— Pre-1923 and post-1986: Articles published before January 1, 1923 or after December 31, 1986 are free with your digital subscription and are not limited in any way.

I don’t know how much the Times makes on $3.95/article for the 1923-1986 time frame, but I suspect it’s not much. Why not make everything before (pick a date) free, each with a permanent link? This would throw off many scholastic, cultural and economic benefits. On the economic front, it would draw more inbound traffic to the Times‘ site, with lots of opportunities to advertise to visitors. In fact, I’ll bet the paper would make more off advertising to traffic arriving at archived articles than it makes off those $3.95 purchases.

But, maybe I’m wrong. Corrections welcome.

In any case, I’m not yet in the market. I love the Times, and often buy it on the newsstand. But $455 per year is steep for me. Plus, I’m already paying the Times‘ parent company for my printed copies of the Boston Globe. I’d like to read the digital edition of that too, because it’s free for print subscribers; but the login/password thing has yet to work for me.

Off the top of my head, here are some other paid subscriptions around here:

Consumer Reports

The Wall Street Journal (both print and online)

Forbes

Fortune

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

The Economist

Vanity Fair

Vogue

The Sun

The New Yorker

Linux Journal (which I get free, actually, because I write for it)

All but The Sun have digital editions, and I read those as well. The only one I don’t read digitally, so far, is the Globe. I’ll try to fix that again tomorrow and see where it goes. I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, I urge all those pubs to make the old stuff free on the open Web, while we still have one. It’ll help.

The Knicks just beat the Pacers, 102 to 88, in Indiana. Jeremy Lin had 19 points, 7 rebounds, 6 assists, 1 steal and 1 block. He only had two turnovers — his one problem stat. But that problem will end, because Jeremy Lin is a learner. That’s the second reason why he won’t be relegated to the bench from whence he came only six weeks ago. The first reason is that he’s clearly way better than the average NBA point guard, and better than many other starters as well. A lot of other teams would very much like to have Jeremy Lin starting for them.

Many in the media had written off Jeremy Lin after the Knicks hit the skid that ended with Mike D’Antoni’s resignation as head coach. But Jeremy has participated in the Knicks’ three straight wins since then, as a starter. I listened to the fourth quarter of this game, and he was the Main Man down the stretch, grabbing rebounds, getting steals, distributing the ball, drawing fouls, and hitting four straight free throws without a miss.

Not many people have visited the possibility that Jeremy Lin went undrafted because he wasn’t this good then. He got this good by playing against better competition, and learning every step of the way.

Look at his stats across four years at Harvard. When he arrived, recalled a Harvard coach, he was physically the weakest player on the team. Lin fixed that, and he’s still fixing it. All his stats went up, for the most part steadily. Yet most weren’t as high as he’s achieving now as a starting pro in the NBA.

Some players are already great in high school. A lot of those stay great through their few years in college, and a relative few make it in the NBA. And many of those are done growing as players, once they get there. They become like chess pieces. You know what they’re good for, and use them for that.

But others are on trajectories that start later and grow in a more linear way. Hall-of-Famer Hakeem Olajuwon didn’t play basketball until he was fifteen, the same age at which Michael Jordan didn’t make the cut for his high school varsity team. Both men improved steadily through college and in the NBA. The main difference with Jeremy Lin is that he improved later.

My wife’s business partner, who was a mentor twenty years her senior, was one of the smartest people I ever met. And one of the wisest as well. When I asked her why she wanted to go into business with my wife, she said, “because I could teach her what she didn’t know, and she already knew what I couldn’t teach.”

I think the same thing applies to the best athletes. They are talented, but teachable. They can learn what they don’t know, and improve what don’t do well enough yet.

Jeremy Lin is that kind of player. Unless he gets injured, he’ll be fine. And so will team he plays with, if they’re ready to catch the ball.

Some clothing we need. That’s the kind that keeps us warm, or shielded from sunlight, or from getting our feet burned or cut up. Some clothing we wear because we like the way it makes us look, or how it gives us a way to conform with social conventions, or to flaut the same.

But basically, clothing keeps us covered up. It hides what we call our “privates.” Also our love handles, pot bellies, surgery scars, cellulite, man-boobs, and tattoos we’d rather not show. Clothing can also enlarge or showcase our best features, or make our less-than-best look better.

In all cases other than the naked one, clothing gives us a means for doing what techies call selective disclosure — while just as selectively keeping some things undisclosed. Or, therefore, private.

What I’m saying here is that maybe, as we debate what privacy is, what it means, and how to deal with it through technology, business and policy, that the things that can teach us the most about privacy are the ones in our closets and drawers.

Check the Arbitronradio listening ratings for Washington DC. You have to go waaaay down the list before you find a single AM station that isn’t also simulcast on FM. But then, if you go to the bottom of the list, you’ll also find a clump of Internet streams of local radio stations.

You’ll see the same pattern at other cities on this list from Radio-Info.com. FM on top, AM below, and streams at the bottom.

Note that Pandora, Spotify, SiriusXM and other radio-like streaming services are not listed. Nor are podcasts or anything else one might listen to, including stuff on one’s smartphone, ‘pod or ‘pad. If they were, they’d be way up that list. According to Pandora CEO Joseph Kennedy (in this Radio INK piece),

…we have transitioned from being a small to medium sized radio station in every market in the U.S. to one of the largest radio stations in every market in the country. Based on the growth we continue to see, we anticipate that by the end of this year, we will be larger than the largest FM or AM radio station in most markets in U.S. As a consequence, our relevance to buyers of traditional radio advertising in skyrocketing. We have already begun to see the early benefits of this dramatic change. Our audio advertising more than doubled to more than $100 million in fiscal 2012.

Back when I was in the biz, public radio was a similar form of dark matter in the ratings. If you added up all the stations’ shares, they came 10-13% short of 100%. If one went to Arbitron’s headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland (as many of us did) to look at the “diaries” of surveyed listeners, you’d find that most of the missing numbers were from noncommercial stations. Today those are listed, and the biggest are usually at or near the top of the ratings.

But today’s dark matter includes a variety of radio-like and non-radio listening choices, including podcasts, satellite radio, and what the industry calls “pure-play streamers” and “on-demand music services.” Together all of these are putting a huge squeeze on radio as we knew it. AM is still around, and will last longest in places where it’s still the best way to listen, especially in cars. In flat prairie states with high ground conductivity, an AM station’s signal can spread over enormous areas. For example, here is the daytime coverage map from Radio-Locator.com for 5000-watt WNAX/570am in Yankton, South Dakota:

No FM station can achieve the same range, and much of that flat rural territory isn’t covered by cellular systems, a primary distribution system for the data streams that comprise Internet radio.

True, satellite radio covers the whole country, but there are no local or regional radio stations on SiriusXM, the only company in the satellite radio business. To some degree rural places are also served by AM radio at night, when signals bounce off the ionosphere, and a few big stations — especially those on “clear” channels — can be heard reliably up to several thousand miles away. (Listen to good car radio at night in Hawaii and you’ll still hear many AM stations from North America.) But, starting in 1980, “clears” were only protected to 750 miles from their transmitters, and many new stations came on the air to fill in “holes” that really weren’t. As a result AM listening at night is a noisy mess on nearly every channel, once you move outside any local station’s immediate coverage area on the ground.

Even in Dallas-Fort Worth, where WBAP is the biggest signal in town (reaching from Kansas to the Gulf of Mexico, as you see above), WBAP is pretty far down in the ratings. (Copyright restrictions prevent direct quoting of ratings numbers, but at least we can link to them.) Same for KLIF and KRLD, two other AM powerhouses with coverage comparable to WBAP’s. News and sports, the last two staple offerings on the AM band, have also been migrating to FM. Many large AM news and sports stations in major metro areas now simulcast on FM, and some sound like they’re about to abandon their AM facilities entirely.WEEI in Boston no longer even mentions the fact that they’re on 850 on the AM dial. Their biggest competitor, WBZ-FM (“The Sports Hub”) is FM-only.

But while FM is finally beating AM, its ratings today look like AM’s back in the 1950s. FM wasn’t taken seriously by the radio industry then, even though it sounded much better, and also came in stereo. Today the over-the-air radio industry knows it is mightily threatened (as well as augmented, in some cases) by streaming and other listening choices. It also knows it’s not going to go away as long as over-the-air radio can be received in large areas where data streams cannot. It’s an open question, however, whether broadcasters will want to continue spending many thousands of dollars every month on transmitters of signals that can no longer be justified financially.

One big question for radio is the same one that faces TV. That is, What will ESPN do?

ESPN is the Giant Kahuna that’s keeping millions of listeners on AM and FM radio, and viewers on cable and satellite. Many of those would leave if the same content were streamed directly over the Net. But for now ESPN appears to be fine with distributing its programming through cable and local radio. But at some point ESPN will go direct — over the Net —and avoid the old distribution methods — especially if listeners and viewers would rather have it that way.

To do that they’ll be distributing mostly through ISPs, which these days are mostly cable and phone companies. While those companies like to say they favor “neutrality” toward content, their business ideal is monopsony toward content suppliers and monopoly toward customers. So expect a lot of theater in the next couple of years.

Nearly three years after Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. kicked off a drive to make cable programming available online for cable subscribers, the idea of TV Everywhere remains mired in technical holdups, slow deal-making and disputes over who will control TV customers in the future.

Say what? Control?

Excuse me, but no. Cable doesn’t control us now, and won’t control us in the future, either. As long as Cable keeps trying to choke us, we’ll keep cutting the cords.

Not surprisingly, Cable calls Internet-based distribution of content “over the top,” or OTT. Up here, over the top of cable’s clutches, is the everywhere we call the world.

Whether or not cable and phone companies succeed in building out the fully licensed world (that is, sucking everywhere down under the lids of their closed systems), we will remain free. We can live without you if we have to. Always could, always will.

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